Full Description
Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025
Shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025
The poems of The Shark Nursery respond to a disturbed world.
The experience of lockdown, of lives lived in an online reality, and of
the animal world are the interlocking parts of the poems' world. The
animal poems draw on the tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth.
From the wolf's touch to the rat's tweet, animals and fish refuse the
roles human beings impose on them. O'Malley's animals find new language
in the face of contemporary perils.
In fusing mythic with modern elements, The Shark Nursery is
marked by rigorous attention to language and tone. Its poems weave
between human, animal and metaphysical realms. In a space before noise
begins, tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in
Suburbia. In the strange, sealed off world portrayed in the 'The Ballad
of Googletown' - an eerie, genuine ballad, where the familiar tropes and
refrains of ballad are hung out to dry - lives are lived online and
social interaction is unnecessary:
The cars are in the drive
And the bees are in the hive
They say the kids are safe inside
In Googletown
This new book promises, as Joseph O'Connor has written, all those
things 'we go to Mary O'Malley for: truthfulness, seriousness,
playfulness, too, and then a particular sort of hesitating and hard-won
wisdom, a pushback against nonsense or sentiment or fakery, the beauty
of plain words placed in careful order, carefully - and always, the
bliss of musicality.'
